LSU head coach returns home; glad to see Oak Ridge family

Monday

Feb 6, 2017 at 7:38 PM

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Oak Ridge’s very own Nikki Fargas (formerly Nikki Caldwell) was in East Tennessee on Thursday night, Feb. 2, as her LSU Lady Tigers once again took on Holly Warlick’s University of Tennessee players.

Cody McClure/The Oak Ridger

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Oak Ridge’s very own Nikki Fargas (formerly Nikki Caldwell) was in East Tennessee on Thursday night, Feb. 2, as her LSU Lady Tigers once again took on Holly Warlick’s University of Tennessee players.

While the game didn’t turn out as the head coach would’ve liked — LSU fell 77-58 as the Lady Vols won their fourth straight game — the former Oak Ridge Lady Wildcat was glad to be “home.”

“I don’t have a chance to come home a lot,” Fargas told The Oak Ridger after the game. “I try to come home in the summer.

“We typically come back, usually around July — and it’s always good to come back.”

Fargas said this was her first time back in Tennessee since her former head coach Pat Summitt died after a battle with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease on June 28, 2016.

“I mean, this is home. This is my roots,” coach Fargas said. “There’s a special place in my heart for Tennessee … and when you play Tennessee, the thing you always think about is, ‘Is Pat going to be proud of you?’

“You kind of want her blessing, and you want to see if your kids are doing the right thing the right way.”

The LSU coach said that she still has family in The Secret City.

“I’ve got cousins and aunts in Oak Ridge, and it was great to see that my grandfather made it here to the game tonight,” Fargas said Thursday after the game. “My mom lives in Baton Rouge, and I had some family members move to Baton Rouge from Oak Ridge, so I get to see some of my family quite often.”

Fargas was recruited from Oak Ridge High School to play basketball for Summitt. She was a Lady Volunteer from 1990 to 1994, when the ’91 team she played on went 30-5 and won a national title.

In fact, every team Fargas was on won at least 28 games.

After her “playing” career, Fargas was a graduate assistant under Summitt, then went on to land an assistant coaching job at Virginia. In the early 2000s, Summitt hired her on as a full-time assistant coach.

In 2004 — with Warlick — she recruited one of the most impressive signing classes in the history of women’s basketball as UT brought in six high school All-Americans. One of those happened to be Candace Parker, who helped guide the Lady Vols to back-to-back national titles in 2007 and 2008.

Fargas went on to become the head coach at UCLA before taking the LSU head coaching job in 2011. Her Lady Tigers’ teams have made four NCAA Tournaments, including two Sweet 16 appearances. This year, LSU is 15-7 and now 4-5 in the Southeastern Conference.

Fargas attributes a lot of her current success to those who helped her get to this point professionally.

“Coach Summitt recruited me from Oak Ridge,” she recalled. “And I was coached by one of the best coaches in high school — and that’s Jill Prudden. She prepared me for Tennessee.

“She taught me what it took to work hard and to be mindful of scouting, and to be intelligent but be coachable … All of those things that you need to be successful at this level.”

There’s probably a good reason the court at the Wildcat Arena is named after Prudden, who served as head coach of the ORHS girls basketball team for 31 seasons before her retirement in 2010. In 2016, coach Prudden was inducted into the TSSAA Hall of Fame.

Contact Cody McClure at (865) 220-5501 and follow him on Twitter @oakridgersports.

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